One of my earliest memories is singing the entire score to the Wizard of Oz, over and over again, and being so pleased with myself. I knew that I was singing it right and well and beautifully. My mother probably about lost her mind. I think I was four or five.
It was the beginning of a long life of singing in choirs, and shows, and recitals, and opera choruses, and the occasional mainstage production, and churches. From time to time, I’ve paid my bills as a singer and I’ve had a few nice successes. My college degree is in vocal performance.
But recently I lost my voice. Well, I haven’t lost my voice, but I’ve lost my Voice.
I thought it was post nasal drip, or vocal abuse from too much teaching/talking/singing/shouting, or not singing high notes correctly, or allergies.
The gravel in my speaking voice wouldn’t go away, my singing voice felt stiff, there were hisses and stops and starts in the voice that weren’t there before. So I went to see a friend who is a leading laryngologist here in town.
And after a relatively uncomfortable encounter involving a camera down my throat, what’s the news? Nerve damage, most likely caused by a virus that I didn’t even notice at the time, to the arytenoid cartilage – not the vocal folds themselves – causing the vocal cords to close asymmetrically. Yeah, yeah, what’s that mean? It means that my vocal cords don’t vibrate at the same frequency and they aren’t in contact all along their length as they vibrate. Air escapes and creates holes in the voice. It feels and sounds like being on the edge of laryngitis. Except that it’s permanent.
The gravelly voice and the stiffness and the crackles and pops in my singing voice are permanent.
What? Excuse me, WHAT?
My doctor says that nerves can regenerate to some extent over the year following the damage, and that exercising a muscle weakened by nerve damage can help to prevent further loss of function and perhaps even help me to modify how I create sound, thus allowing me to keep some useful singing function – he doesn’t know. I can come back in a year and he’ll look and we’ll see.
In one season, I’ve gone from being too much of a soloist to sing in a chorus to being not good enough to sing in a chorus.
I’ve lost my fluid, solid, beautiful voice that I have had since before I could speak. Every time I talk and it’s gravelly and I feel like apologizing for the scratchiness, I realize that it’s the way it is now. It’s structural. I saw it on the doctor’s TV screen.
It never occurred to me to be grateful for my voice. Greta Garbo-like, I’ve reclined on my Chaise of Life, back of the hand to my forehead, and bemoaned the Burden of a Gift that I Don’t Know What To Do With, or Why Didn’t I Do More With It, or What Shall I Do Now? The artistic version of White Man’s Burden. Cry me a river!
But I’ve never stopped and been thankful for a lovely voice that did pretty much whatever I asked it to do. It was part of me, one of my quirky talents, like my ability to read a thousand words a minute or make up a new recipe on the fly or see the one typo on a page at a glance.
So a lifetime of “near misses” with a singing career (my friend Sally says, “What’s a near miss? You were a featured soloist on the stage of the Hult Center, singing to 2,000 people for God’s sake!”) is over. I don’t have to feel badly any more that I didn’t do more with my talent. As Cat Stevens sang, “And if I ever lose my mouth, all my teeth, north and south, oh if I ever lose my mouth, or if…I won’t have to talk.”
It makes me think of other near misses. The eight-year teaching career that never really quite took off (again, what’s a near miss? Four years of teaching fifth grade, two of teaching music, two years of temping and substitute teaching…). My life as a Development Officer (yeah, yeah, I was never vice president of a college but I did raise a million dollars and made a world-class fencing facility in Portland, Oregon possible). I agree, at this late date, I could reset my definition of what’s a near miss. Still, they feel like near misses to me. I wanted to be the BEST at something. I thought that singing might be it.
I guess what bothers me most is that this and that happens, and plans go aft agley. Life is so goddamned RANDOM.
It’s not that the world is a dangerous place. It’s that it’s such a RANDOM place. And some random happens that’s not good.
And some random happens that’s terrific, like my blissful marriage to the Best Man in the World and being the mother of the Best Two Kids in the World, our overall good health, good friends, Ed finding a job he likes through the most unlikely sequence of events you can imagine, all of four of us enjoying intelligence, optimism (modesty, let’s not forget modesty), and stubbornness.
Last year, when I was hesitating over what to plant where and what if things don’t come up? …my friends and fellow gardeners David and Linda let me in on their philosophy of gardening. “Just plant a bunch of stuff, Brenda. Some things will come up and some things don’t.”
Just keep digging, just keep getting dirt under my nails, just keep planting. Ya get dirty. Some things come up and some things don’t.
And maybe I’ll take a few days to cry me a river.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Earthquake
I remember, once, watching the front yard ripple like a wave heading for shore – except it was heading for the living room in which I stood. Then the earthquake met the leading edge of the house and the sound of a freight train filled my ears, and I could hear my mother’s dishes and my father’s cathode ray tube collection crashing to the floor in the dining room. I wanted to sprout wings and fly. Get away, get away!
It’s dangerous out there.
I felt almost the same way today, reading the New York Times. I quit watching the news years ago, when I realized just how incomplete and slanted and “watch the birdie!” it was. Besides, it was really depressing. And I may have to start spooning the print news out into more easily digestible portions, too. Really. Arizona’s new immigration laws, the Birthers, a far-right conservative who isn’t re-elected because he’s not conservative enough. They say that one of the ways to be most at risk to be manipulated by others is to be governed by fear and uncertainty. Well, a lot of us must be scared and uncertain, because a few noisy angry people are having an outsize effect on the rest of the country. Tea Partiers “taking back our country”? It’s my country too, and I don’t want you to have it.
I used to say to myself that when the Homeland Security Act and the far-right made my beautiful home too threatening to live in, that I might take a break and go live in Canada for awhile. Or Europe. But now we’re looking at the collapse of countries, and perhaps of whole regional economic systems. Global warming – yes, I know we like to call it climate change, but it’s global warming, folks – as well as unwatched aging nuclear stores and computer systems – threaten us all.
Jeez, it's not just dangerous out there -- the whole GLOBE is perilous.
And for most people, always has been and always will be. As I sit here, harrowed up with angst about Apocalypse Sometime Soon, I need to remember that for the majority of people on the planet, clean water is a hard-to-come-by luxury and one good meal a day is all you can hope for. That students are walking ten miles to get to a school with no books. They’re not living in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s just home.
It’s a beautiful day. I live in a neighborhood just south of Portland, Oregon, and my city sits down and across a little river, and I can walk to a bluff and admire it from afar. I planted spinach and carrots yesterday. I’ve got a fortune in leeks growing in one garden bed, and the garlic is coming on. The farmer’s market meets today, about five blocks from my house. Today is a good day to be alive.
But I see the earthquake rippling toward us. In times like these, when I see the ground rushing up toward us and I can no longer say, like the guy whose parachute didn’t open, “So far, so good,” it’s taking some mulling over – how do I continue to live with hope and purpose? J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the popular “Lord of the Rings” and a survivor of the First World War, once wrote that the English shared a common attitude – being essentially cheerful people, they can stay happy as long as despair can be postponed. (And, presumably, maintaining a stiff upper lip even when it can’t.)
Meanwhile, I plant my raspberries and asparagus and the new apple tree, teach my daughter how to drive a stick shift and my son how to write a five-paragraph essay – and prepare to enjoy the fruit of my labors for the next forty years or so.
Yes, it’s a dangerous planet, but it’s the only one we’ve got. And it’s home.
It’s dangerous out there.
I felt almost the same way today, reading the New York Times. I quit watching the news years ago, when I realized just how incomplete and slanted and “watch the birdie!” it was. Besides, it was really depressing. And I may have to start spooning the print news out into more easily digestible portions, too. Really. Arizona’s new immigration laws, the Birthers, a far-right conservative who isn’t re-elected because he’s not conservative enough. They say that one of the ways to be most at risk to be manipulated by others is to be governed by fear and uncertainty. Well, a lot of us must be scared and uncertain, because a few noisy angry people are having an outsize effect on the rest of the country. Tea Partiers “taking back our country”? It’s my country too, and I don’t want you to have it.
I used to say to myself that when the Homeland Security Act and the far-right made my beautiful home too threatening to live in, that I might take a break and go live in Canada for awhile. Or Europe. But now we’re looking at the collapse of countries, and perhaps of whole regional economic systems. Global warming – yes, I know we like to call it climate change, but it’s global warming, folks – as well as unwatched aging nuclear stores and computer systems – threaten us all.
Jeez, it's not just dangerous out there -- the whole GLOBE is perilous.
And for most people, always has been and always will be. As I sit here, harrowed up with angst about Apocalypse Sometime Soon, I need to remember that for the majority of people on the planet, clean water is a hard-to-come-by luxury and one good meal a day is all you can hope for. That students are walking ten miles to get to a school with no books. They’re not living in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s just home.
It’s a beautiful day. I live in a neighborhood just south of Portland, Oregon, and my city sits down and across a little river, and I can walk to a bluff and admire it from afar. I planted spinach and carrots yesterday. I’ve got a fortune in leeks growing in one garden bed, and the garlic is coming on. The farmer’s market meets today, about five blocks from my house. Today is a good day to be alive.
But I see the earthquake rippling toward us. In times like these, when I see the ground rushing up toward us and I can no longer say, like the guy whose parachute didn’t open, “So far, so good,” it’s taking some mulling over – how do I continue to live with hope and purpose? J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the popular “Lord of the Rings” and a survivor of the First World War, once wrote that the English shared a common attitude – being essentially cheerful people, they can stay happy as long as despair can be postponed. (And, presumably, maintaining a stiff upper lip even when it can’t.)
Meanwhile, I plant my raspberries and asparagus and the new apple tree, teach my daughter how to drive a stick shift and my son how to write a five-paragraph essay – and prepare to enjoy the fruit of my labors for the next forty years or so.
Yes, it’s a dangerous planet, but it’s the only one we’ve got. And it’s home.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
World Warming
This just in: I'm fifty-three.
No, now, really, this is serious. I know I keep harping on it, but what a shock!
It happened suddenly, too -- kind of like a car accident, which also just happened last week. One minute you're driving at a steady pace down Southeast Ash and the next minute a van has crashed into you and your car doesn't look the same anymore.
I mean, one minute you're forty-three and going back to school and everyone tells you look thirty and the next you're fifty-three and you tell people so and they don't even bother to remonstrate politely. They just say, "Oh."
I know what happened. I was really fat for years and wouldn't look in the mirror or let anybody take a picture of me. So then I lost a lot of weight and I had to look in the mirror to buy clothes that fit and people started taking pictures again and jeez, the face I see in the mirror, well, SUDDENLY it's a -- middle-aged -- face. And you know the saying that fat plumps out your wrinkles and thin people wrinkle more than fat people? It's true.
Now, I wouldn't care if these outward changes weren't accompanied by some inward changes. Well, some things go along with the territory, like how many pairs of glasses do I need now? Readers, computer/piano/dicing onions glasses, distance glasses, bifocals, and then just accepting blurry for awhile because I read for two hours and it will take my eyes two hours to be able to focus on that tree, even with my new glasses on? If you're over fifty you're laughing ruefully, and you over there, yes you, just wait. You'll see!
Or not!
Anyway. Inward changes. The part that didn't change inside is the just-out-of-college part, the me who knows all the slang and is really cool and a little whacky and quirky and energetic and knows obscure topical references that only a few other cool people know, like Klaus Nomi and Eddie Izzard stand-up routines. (Yes, I know these are '80s references.) So this whacky quirky college student is where? Behind the fifty-three-year-old face.
My daughter says that my college-student self is shining through my fifty-three-year-old face and that's what makes me so cool. Aw.
What I notice most though, is that I don't want to set the world on fire anymore.
Big one. Because up to this last year, I wanted to change the world in a big way. Be a famous opera singer or do original research into the nature of sleep or stop global warming or nuclear proliferation or at least inspire classroom after classroom of kids to change the world for me.
But now?
Not so much.
Besides, I kinda feel like I've been changing the world all along. But in quiet, subtle ways.
There's a sidewalk between a middle school and a popular shopping center that's there purely because of my advocacy.
A church has an organ, in part because of my service on a committee.
Several of my friends have jobs they like because I connected some dots.
Dozens of kids are more confident and excited about themselves as learners because of me.
My son loves Star Trek, Mozart and Italian cooking because of me. My daughter is discovering herself as an actress because of me.
Oh, that's right, these two vital warmhearted people are in the world because of me!
But is that setting the world on fire?
No.
Do I still have opportunities to try?
Yes! Yes, I do. And I see Hillarie Clinton and Gail Collins and Nancy Pelosi and I hear all about how we get a second wind in our fifties and you know, right now I'm using my second wind to garden and cook and take eight-mile walks and spend time with friends and sit and write and maybe read a book. Because it's more than 25 years since I've had time to do these things. I've been running for the train, catching hold by my fingertips and hoisting myself aboard since forever, and setting the world on fire looks like too much damn work. It's a big world.
I think I'll just warm it up a little.
No, now, really, this is serious. I know I keep harping on it, but what a shock!
It happened suddenly, too -- kind of like a car accident, which also just happened last week. One minute you're driving at a steady pace down Southeast Ash and the next minute a van has crashed into you and your car doesn't look the same anymore.
I mean, one minute you're forty-three and going back to school and everyone tells you look thirty and the next you're fifty-three and you tell people so and they don't even bother to remonstrate politely. They just say, "Oh."
I know what happened. I was really fat for years and wouldn't look in the mirror or let anybody take a picture of me. So then I lost a lot of weight and I had to look in the mirror to buy clothes that fit and people started taking pictures again and jeez, the face I see in the mirror, well, SUDDENLY it's a -- middle-aged -- face. And you know the saying that fat plumps out your wrinkles and thin people wrinkle more than fat people? It's true.
Now, I wouldn't care if these outward changes weren't accompanied by some inward changes. Well, some things go along with the territory, like how many pairs of glasses do I need now? Readers, computer/piano/dicing onions glasses, distance glasses, bifocals, and then just accepting blurry for awhile because I read for two hours and it will take my eyes two hours to be able to focus on that tree, even with my new glasses on? If you're over fifty you're laughing ruefully, and you over there, yes you, just wait. You'll see!
Or not!
Anyway. Inward changes. The part that didn't change inside is the just-out-of-college part, the me who knows all the slang and is really cool and a little whacky and quirky and energetic and knows obscure topical references that only a few other cool people know, like Klaus Nomi and Eddie Izzard stand-up routines. (Yes, I know these are '80s references.) So this whacky quirky college student is where? Behind the fifty-three-year-old face.
My daughter says that my college-student self is shining through my fifty-three-year-old face and that's what makes me so cool. Aw.
What I notice most though, is that I don't want to set the world on fire anymore.
Big one. Because up to this last year, I wanted to change the world in a big way. Be a famous opera singer or do original research into the nature of sleep or stop global warming or nuclear proliferation or at least inspire classroom after classroom of kids to change the world for me.
But now?
Not so much.
Besides, I kinda feel like I've been changing the world all along. But in quiet, subtle ways.
There's a sidewalk between a middle school and a popular shopping center that's there purely because of my advocacy.
A church has an organ, in part because of my service on a committee.
Several of my friends have jobs they like because I connected some dots.
Dozens of kids are more confident and excited about themselves as learners because of me.
My son loves Star Trek, Mozart and Italian cooking because of me. My daughter is discovering herself as an actress because of me.
Oh, that's right, these two vital warmhearted people are in the world because of me!
But is that setting the world on fire?
No.
Do I still have opportunities to try?
Yes! Yes, I do. And I see Hillarie Clinton and Gail Collins and Nancy Pelosi and I hear all about how we get a second wind in our fifties and you know, right now I'm using my second wind to garden and cook and take eight-mile walks and spend time with friends and sit and write and maybe read a book. Because it's more than 25 years since I've had time to do these things. I've been running for the train, catching hold by my fingertips and hoisting myself aboard since forever, and setting the world on fire looks like too much damn work. It's a big world.
I think I'll just warm it up a little.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Angels in Pocatello
I was very proud of my car, that first year in Baltimore. I had no idea of its gas mileage, its reliability, or even the true number on the odometer. Those things were not important. As a matter of fact I had never really thought about them as factors in the purchase of a car. Irrelevancies like licenses and insurance never came to mind either. The car was important because I owned it; none of my friends owned a car. It ran.
This car was a true work of art. Above a dirty mottled and graying green body, its formerly vinyl top rusted into a convincing facsimile of a coral reef. The less said about the body the better…I had learned to park by the crash method. (Into brick walls, not other cars.) It didn’t have a muffler, unless you counted the coffee can that I’d wired to the exhaust pipe with a coat hanger. Listening to it start up at seven a.m. on Sunday mornings was a religious experience: ka-POW! whum whum whum…It had to warm up for ten minutes before it would go anywhere.
One warm and humid June morning, my friend Laura and my husband Ralph and I emptied the contents of the car into the neighborhood dumpster, and got in to drive to Portland, Oregon, 3,200 miles away. We planned to do this in two days and seven hours, fifteen minutes less than our previous best. We were well provisioned: A bag of hard-boiled eggs, two loaves of bread, a dozen apples, Snickers bars, and enough money for gas and coffee. The coffee was the only weakness in the plan. We made stops for only one reason – for gas. Any other out-of-car experiences necessarily occurred within the ten minutes it took to fill up the car, pay for the gas, and pull out of the gas station. Ding ding!
We were used to these trips. We made them at least once a year to visit family, celebrate holidays, and to earn some money over the summer. They were, for the most part, uneventful, though from time to time we made unplanned side trips. Once, Laura and I got too interested in a conversation in German and ended up traveling 300 miles toward Texas at 2:00 in the morning. And there was one late evening that had a sort of nightmare quality where Greeley, Colorado kept showing up in the headlights no matter what we did. These were unusual events, however. It’s hard to get lost when most of the trip consists of pointing the car west and then trying not to fall asleep while driving towards North Platte. (It didn’t seem to matter if we did drive off the road in Nebraska – the surrounding countryside was just as flat as the road.)
We were passing Pocatello, Idaho, practically in Portland’s back yard, and feeling that fatal end-of-trip lassitude that comes too early in a journey of this kind. As we watched Pocatello float past us at 75 mph, I said, “God, I’m glad I don’t live in Pocatello.”
Whang whang whang CRASH!
At the time, we didn’t know what had happened. We found ourselves standing on the gravel shoulder of the highway, staring at our smoking car while cars full of westbound travelers whizzed by. As we stood there, speechless, a Jeep pulled up behind us. Out of it jumped a short, muscular man, who threw himself under our car for a brief inspection, leaped to his feet, and pointed to his car. “Get in.”
We got in.
Thinking about ax murderers, highwaymen who prey on helpless music students, and other shady characters, I asked him his name and where we were going.
He was George de Tillot and he was taking us, along with a large potted plant, as a gift to his wife. (We learned later that he had been one of the few French aviators to survive World War II and that his name was really pronounced duh-tee-YOH, but since this was Idaho it was now dee-tillut.)
The double-wide mobile home lived on an acre of dust and was kept company by a large RV, a boat, and a sedan. As we pulled up, Arletta deTillot opened the door. “Look what I’ve brought you!” her husband shouted as he handed her the plant and gave her a resounding kiss. She took one look at us and disappeared into the house, only to reappear a few minutes later with a stack of linens.
As Laura and I made up our beds in the RV (we had been segregated by gender, first thing) and Ralph supposedly was doing the same thing in the house, we speculated about our condition. Are they crazy? Can we trust them? It looks clean. They seem nice. We had been given instructions to make up our beds and then come into the house to wash and have drinks before dinner. Dazedly, dutifully, we finished our beds and presented ourselves for pre-dinner talk.
The talk, over beer, sodas, and bourbon, was about the car. The chief of police was a friend of George’s. George had called him and asked him not to tow the car, it was not abandoned. He, George, would take care of it. Then he had called the mechanic in town (another friend) and asked him to tow the car to his garage and call him with an estimate of the damage. These things would all be done very soon. We had nothing to worry about. We were their guests until the car would be fixed.
I don’t recall any questions about who we were and what we did and why we were so far from home. Gently, in conversation that continued over dinner (meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and peas), and then in the living room over coffee, they extracted the particulars from us. Laura and Brenda are music students. Ralph is a concert pianist. We are traveling from Baltimore to visit our families in Oregon. No, we don’t have a credit card. Actually, we have no money at all – just enough to get to Portland.
They repeated, you have nothing to worry about. Go to bed, get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll see what the mechanic has to say, and you can do some sightseeing around Pocatello (!). Ralph, our piano is your piano – we would be pleased if you would take this opportunity to practice your regular hours.
Off we went to bed, not much more informed than we had been about who these delightful people were, but no longer worried that they were relatives of Norman Bates.
The next day, we learned that the car was seriously damaged. Something called the “universal bolt” had “sheared off,” and we were lucky that the entire drive train of the car hadn’t ripped through the body and killed us all. How much would it cost to repair? Oh, impossible to tell…it will take several days…don’t worry about it.
Several days! We can’t stay here several days!
Of course you can. Do you have calls you wish to make? We will lend you our car, so you can drive around and look at things. We will be happy to have such distinguished musical guests. You can give us a concert your last night here, to pay for your room and board. We will pay for the car’s repairs, and you can pay us back when you can.
But George, we don’t have any money. We don’t know when we can pay you back.
That is not a worry. Let me tell you a little story.
I believe in angels. Long ago, I was an aviator, flying for France. Most of us were killed in that war. I had many…experiences. I was lucky to live. When I needed help, people helped me. They refused any payment or obligation, and would only say that I must pass on what I had received. After the war, when I came to America and married Arletta, we decided that we would always help people who needed help. So you are not the first, you see. This is a good location. People fall off the highway all the time.
But George! You trust perfect strangers in your house, with your car! Isn’t it dangerous? Don’t you worry about people stealing from you?
How can they steal? We are giving! One couple did take our car once. We never saw them again. But year after year, dozens of people, only one bad lot…we are blessed. We have friends all over the world now.
George, how can we ever repay you?
I will tell you exactly how to repay me. Pass it on. Help others. And when you drive through Pocatello again, you must stop and visit and play for us.
We sat over our cups of coffee, looking at the angel in jeans and a plaid shirt.
That’s about all. The car was repaired, I don’t know how. George’s friend must have rebuilt the engine. We did add a muffler, greatly diminishing the drama of Sunday mornings. The car ran fine for several trips after that, trips that always included a visit to Pocatello and our angels, until the day Ralph drove the car west, away from Baltimore, and me.
This car was a true work of art. Above a dirty mottled and graying green body, its formerly vinyl top rusted into a convincing facsimile of a coral reef. The less said about the body the better…I had learned to park by the crash method. (Into brick walls, not other cars.) It didn’t have a muffler, unless you counted the coffee can that I’d wired to the exhaust pipe with a coat hanger. Listening to it start up at seven a.m. on Sunday mornings was a religious experience: ka-POW! whum whum whum…It had to warm up for ten minutes before it would go anywhere.
One warm and humid June morning, my friend Laura and my husband Ralph and I emptied the contents of the car into the neighborhood dumpster, and got in to drive to Portland, Oregon, 3,200 miles away. We planned to do this in two days and seven hours, fifteen minutes less than our previous best. We were well provisioned: A bag of hard-boiled eggs, two loaves of bread, a dozen apples, Snickers bars, and enough money for gas and coffee. The coffee was the only weakness in the plan. We made stops for only one reason – for gas. Any other out-of-car experiences necessarily occurred within the ten minutes it took to fill up the car, pay for the gas, and pull out of the gas station. Ding ding!
We were used to these trips. We made them at least once a year to visit family, celebrate holidays, and to earn some money over the summer. They were, for the most part, uneventful, though from time to time we made unplanned side trips. Once, Laura and I got too interested in a conversation in German and ended up traveling 300 miles toward Texas at 2:00 in the morning. And there was one late evening that had a sort of nightmare quality where Greeley, Colorado kept showing up in the headlights no matter what we did. These were unusual events, however. It’s hard to get lost when most of the trip consists of pointing the car west and then trying not to fall asleep while driving towards North Platte. (It didn’t seem to matter if we did drive off the road in Nebraska – the surrounding countryside was just as flat as the road.)
We were passing Pocatello, Idaho, practically in Portland’s back yard, and feeling that fatal end-of-trip lassitude that comes too early in a journey of this kind. As we watched Pocatello float past us at 75 mph, I said, “God, I’m glad I don’t live in Pocatello.”
Whang whang whang CRASH!
At the time, we didn’t know what had happened. We found ourselves standing on the gravel shoulder of the highway, staring at our smoking car while cars full of westbound travelers whizzed by. As we stood there, speechless, a Jeep pulled up behind us. Out of it jumped a short, muscular man, who threw himself under our car for a brief inspection, leaped to his feet, and pointed to his car. “Get in.”
We got in.
Thinking about ax murderers, highwaymen who prey on helpless music students, and other shady characters, I asked him his name and where we were going.
He was George de Tillot and he was taking us, along with a large potted plant, as a gift to his wife. (We learned later that he had been one of the few French aviators to survive World War II and that his name was really pronounced duh-tee-YOH, but since this was Idaho it was now dee-tillut.)
The double-wide mobile home lived on an acre of dust and was kept company by a large RV, a boat, and a sedan. As we pulled up, Arletta deTillot opened the door. “Look what I’ve brought you!” her husband shouted as he handed her the plant and gave her a resounding kiss. She took one look at us and disappeared into the house, only to reappear a few minutes later with a stack of linens.
As Laura and I made up our beds in the RV (we had been segregated by gender, first thing) and Ralph supposedly was doing the same thing in the house, we speculated about our condition. Are they crazy? Can we trust them? It looks clean. They seem nice. We had been given instructions to make up our beds and then come into the house to wash and have drinks before dinner. Dazedly, dutifully, we finished our beds and presented ourselves for pre-dinner talk.
The talk, over beer, sodas, and bourbon, was about the car. The chief of police was a friend of George’s. George had called him and asked him not to tow the car, it was not abandoned. He, George, would take care of it. Then he had called the mechanic in town (another friend) and asked him to tow the car to his garage and call him with an estimate of the damage. These things would all be done very soon. We had nothing to worry about. We were their guests until the car would be fixed.
I don’t recall any questions about who we were and what we did and why we were so far from home. Gently, in conversation that continued over dinner (meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and peas), and then in the living room over coffee, they extracted the particulars from us. Laura and Brenda are music students. Ralph is a concert pianist. We are traveling from Baltimore to visit our families in Oregon. No, we don’t have a credit card. Actually, we have no money at all – just enough to get to Portland.
They repeated, you have nothing to worry about. Go to bed, get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll see what the mechanic has to say, and you can do some sightseeing around Pocatello (!). Ralph, our piano is your piano – we would be pleased if you would take this opportunity to practice your regular hours.
Off we went to bed, not much more informed than we had been about who these delightful people were, but no longer worried that they were relatives of Norman Bates.
The next day, we learned that the car was seriously damaged. Something called the “universal bolt” had “sheared off,” and we were lucky that the entire drive train of the car hadn’t ripped through the body and killed us all. How much would it cost to repair? Oh, impossible to tell…it will take several days…don’t worry about it.
Several days! We can’t stay here several days!
Of course you can. Do you have calls you wish to make? We will lend you our car, so you can drive around and look at things. We will be happy to have such distinguished musical guests. You can give us a concert your last night here, to pay for your room and board. We will pay for the car’s repairs, and you can pay us back when you can.
But George, we don’t have any money. We don’t know when we can pay you back.
That is not a worry. Let me tell you a little story.
I believe in angels. Long ago, I was an aviator, flying for France. Most of us were killed in that war. I had many…experiences. I was lucky to live. When I needed help, people helped me. They refused any payment or obligation, and would only say that I must pass on what I had received. After the war, when I came to America and married Arletta, we decided that we would always help people who needed help. So you are not the first, you see. This is a good location. People fall off the highway all the time.
But George! You trust perfect strangers in your house, with your car! Isn’t it dangerous? Don’t you worry about people stealing from you?
How can they steal? We are giving! One couple did take our car once. We never saw them again. But year after year, dozens of people, only one bad lot…we are blessed. We have friends all over the world now.
George, how can we ever repay you?
I will tell you exactly how to repay me. Pass it on. Help others. And when you drive through Pocatello again, you must stop and visit and play for us.
We sat over our cups of coffee, looking at the angel in jeans and a plaid shirt.
That’s about all. The car was repaired, I don’t know how. George’s friend must have rebuilt the engine. We did add a muffler, greatly diminishing the drama of Sunday mornings. The car ran fine for several trips after that, trips that always included a visit to Pocatello and our angels, until the day Ralph drove the car west, away from Baltimore, and me.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
We'll Never Get Out of This Alive
I read once that we die of the ills that our age is heir to. In other words, we’ll die of whatever is going around, and lucky for us that it probably won’t be the Black Death or being stoned as a witch. So how afraid can I be of the swine flu, AIDS, radon gas, antibiotic resistant staph? Should I be afraid of flying? (I have been, ever since Reagan broke the back of the traffic controllers’ union.) I took nuclear winter off my list when my American history professor notified me that the Cold War had been over for some years now. Now I worry about stuff like heart disease and cancer, and sometimes surviving the traffic on I-5 during rush hour.
And I have some friends struggling with serious health issues, so worrying about myself seems laughable when my health issues are more along the lines of “No, you can’t eat ice cream every day and expect to stay a reasonable weight.” I’ve even lost some friends to heart disease and cancer recently, which is not only a sad thing but also alarming – I get nervous when people die in their fifties or, God forbid, in their forties. What’s the deal with people dying? He was so young…she was so young…
What I tend to forget is that death is imminent for everybody, depending on how you define imminent. Sometime in the next fifty years, I’ll be dead. That’s pretty soon. I make a lot of long term plans, always have, and fifty years is just the other side of long-term. I had to change my retirement plans so I wouldn’t be out of money and unemployed at the age of 100. Heck, I have a plan to go to Italy to celebrate my 100th birthday, it IS a milestone birthday, although I’m having a hard time getting takers for people to go with me. But even I have to admit that I probably don’t need to make a financial plan for after 106 or so.
Then there are the charms of aging. I have lovely neighbors in their late 90s, retired educators, who are helping me think about what advanced old age can be like if you plan well, stay healthy, and are very lucky. It still looks like hell. And even if I am the luckiest of all and die in my sleep at the same moment with my sweetie, hand in hand, at the age of 106 after having done everything I wanted to do…it’s…still…a world without me anymore.
Now, dying is worth worrying about. It’d be crazy talk to say it isn’t. The thought of not being part of the warp and woof of our family and our friends’ lives is certainly worth concern and maybe even some planning. Children count on us. Spouses and friends. I find, though, that I fear death for itself, not just for the effect my death would have on others. I know that the concept that I won’t be around, forever meddling in the world, is a powerful one that propels me to take all kinds of rash actions.
But the little thought has been creeping into my head lately that maybe the fear of not existing anymore…is maybe a fear that I don’t need to keep. Of all the certainties that life has for us, death is the most certain. Soon or late, we end, and we are remembered or not. We began, too, and had the same amount of consciousness before coming into the world as we presumably will when we leave it. I don’t spend any time thinking about my fate BEFORE my life. Why worry about after?
A friend came over for breakfast this morning and asked me why I wanted to spend my work life in a little box when I could do so much more. She pointed out that we shouldn’t waste any time being miserable, if we can help it. Whether we have ten days, ten years or more, it’s a finite amount of time. So if we want to contribute something lasting to the world, accomplish something specific, have some fun or even get enough sleep, we need to hold the awareness that there is a limited amount of time in which to act.
And maybe that’s what ultimately bothers us about death. Finite isn’t a concept we Americans like. We want to think that we can have it all, if we can afford it. Life, however, does come with an expiration date.
When I was younger, I got around the time limit by carrying on parallel lives. For three memorable years, I was a concert soprano, voice teacher, owner of a pasta business, mother of a young child, a church soloist and a corporate secretary. I don’t recommend it, but it did make the three years seem longer. I spent four years once attending college full-time, working full-time as a college administrator (that’s how I paid for the college), and holding two, no, three part-time jobs. This may have been a bad idea, even if it meant I graduated debt-free.
Now I realize that a time limit can be helpful. Who said that it focuses your mind wonderfully to know you’ll be hanged in the morning? I do pay more attention now, and I stopped feeling smug about multi-tasking on the macro level, even before I recovered from the chronic fatigue. It is permissible to do just one (or maybe two or three, okay?) things at once?
And we do control, to some degree, how much we limit ourselves in other ways. Because, you know, being alive is the discrepancy. It’s the odd state we happen to be in. For most of human history, we weren’t here! Most of the billions of people in the world right now aren’t affected by us, either. The corollary of that is, we are HERE, affecting the few people we affect -- NOW. So all we have to do is live HERE and NOW.
Not easy. I’m the one with the fifty-year plan, remember? But I also need to remember that I’ll never get out of this alive.
So this is it. Here and now.
Live it up!
And I have some friends struggling with serious health issues, so worrying about myself seems laughable when my health issues are more along the lines of “No, you can’t eat ice cream every day and expect to stay a reasonable weight.” I’ve even lost some friends to heart disease and cancer recently, which is not only a sad thing but also alarming – I get nervous when people die in their fifties or, God forbid, in their forties. What’s the deal with people dying? He was so young…she was so young…
What I tend to forget is that death is imminent for everybody, depending on how you define imminent. Sometime in the next fifty years, I’ll be dead. That’s pretty soon. I make a lot of long term plans, always have, and fifty years is just the other side of long-term. I had to change my retirement plans so I wouldn’t be out of money and unemployed at the age of 100. Heck, I have a plan to go to Italy to celebrate my 100th birthday, it IS a milestone birthday, although I’m having a hard time getting takers for people to go with me. But even I have to admit that I probably don’t need to make a financial plan for after 106 or so.
Then there are the charms of aging. I have lovely neighbors in their late 90s, retired educators, who are helping me think about what advanced old age can be like if you plan well, stay healthy, and are very lucky. It still looks like hell. And even if I am the luckiest of all and die in my sleep at the same moment with my sweetie, hand in hand, at the age of 106 after having done everything I wanted to do…it’s…still…a world without me anymore.
Now, dying is worth worrying about. It’d be crazy talk to say it isn’t. The thought of not being part of the warp and woof of our family and our friends’ lives is certainly worth concern and maybe even some planning. Children count on us. Spouses and friends. I find, though, that I fear death for itself, not just for the effect my death would have on others. I know that the concept that I won’t be around, forever meddling in the world, is a powerful one that propels me to take all kinds of rash actions.
But the little thought has been creeping into my head lately that maybe the fear of not existing anymore…is maybe a fear that I don’t need to keep. Of all the certainties that life has for us, death is the most certain. Soon or late, we end, and we are remembered or not. We began, too, and had the same amount of consciousness before coming into the world as we presumably will when we leave it. I don’t spend any time thinking about my fate BEFORE my life. Why worry about after?
A friend came over for breakfast this morning and asked me why I wanted to spend my work life in a little box when I could do so much more. She pointed out that we shouldn’t waste any time being miserable, if we can help it. Whether we have ten days, ten years or more, it’s a finite amount of time. So if we want to contribute something lasting to the world, accomplish something specific, have some fun or even get enough sleep, we need to hold the awareness that there is a limited amount of time in which to act.
And maybe that’s what ultimately bothers us about death. Finite isn’t a concept we Americans like. We want to think that we can have it all, if we can afford it. Life, however, does come with an expiration date.
When I was younger, I got around the time limit by carrying on parallel lives. For three memorable years, I was a concert soprano, voice teacher, owner of a pasta business, mother of a young child, a church soloist and a corporate secretary. I don’t recommend it, but it did make the three years seem longer. I spent four years once attending college full-time, working full-time as a college administrator (that’s how I paid for the college), and holding two, no, three part-time jobs. This may have been a bad idea, even if it meant I graduated debt-free.
Now I realize that a time limit can be helpful. Who said that it focuses your mind wonderfully to know you’ll be hanged in the morning? I do pay more attention now, and I stopped feeling smug about multi-tasking on the macro level, even before I recovered from the chronic fatigue. It is permissible to do just one (or maybe two or three, okay?) things at once?
And we do control, to some degree, how much we limit ourselves in other ways. Because, you know, being alive is the discrepancy. It’s the odd state we happen to be in. For most of human history, we weren’t here! Most of the billions of people in the world right now aren’t affected by us, either. The corollary of that is, we are HERE, affecting the few people we affect -- NOW. So all we have to do is live HERE and NOW.
Not easy. I’m the one with the fifty-year plan, remember? But I also need to remember that I’ll never get out of this alive.
So this is it. Here and now.
Live it up!
The Back Half of the Game
I live and vacation in Oregon, and I like walking on the beach that stretches from Neahkahnie to Nehalem Bay State Park. When the tide is out, it’s possible to walk for eight miles in one direction, thanks to a long sand spit and Oregon’s beach law that says nobody owns the beaches. But the tide never seems to be out in December, and since we live in a part of the Pacific Northwest where we get rain pretty much every day from October to June, it’s a startling coincidence if the sun comes out during low tide. And we live above the 45th parallel, so that means no matter what you had planned, if there’s a sun break (we call them “sun breaks”), get out there while the getting’s good because the sun is above the horizon for maybe eight hours altogether near the turn of the year.
So there I was, walking south toward the winter sun. I had decided to walk 5,000 steps and then turn around – about two and a half miles each way, a good walk on level hard-packed sand. The white foam on the waves reflected brilliantly. That, and the salty wind in my face, made me squint. The awareness of Neahkahnie Mountain behind me made a nice comfortable psychological backrest. I talk to myself when I walk, when I’m not singing arias from La Traviata, and as I walked I flipped through different ways of looking at being in my fifties. (I’m constantly bumping into this fact and getting surprised all over again.)
I reached 5,000 steps and turned around, toward the mountain. And suddenly the ocean turned blue. I had been looking at hard brilliance, walking toward the sun, but now the sun and the wind were at my back and the giant green mountain was before me. I was halfway through my walk, heading home.
And just at that moment, at that halfway point when the world surprised me by becoming even more unbearably beautiful, I had a wonderful realization – I am just halfway through my adult life. I’m not near-elderly, as the federal government likes to call people in their mid-fifties. I’ve been an adult for thirty years and with any luck, I’ll be an adult for at least another thirty. And this thirty years will be the thirty years in which I know who I am, in which I have good friends, in which I know how to take care of my emotional and physical health – all a huge improvement over the first thirty years.
So I’m heading into the back half of the game. Heading home, toward the mountain, wind at my back, sea and sky blue. I’m just starting the best part of my adult life.
I intend to enjoy every bit of it.
So there I was, walking south toward the winter sun. I had decided to walk 5,000 steps and then turn around – about two and a half miles each way, a good walk on level hard-packed sand. The white foam on the waves reflected brilliantly. That, and the salty wind in my face, made me squint. The awareness of Neahkahnie Mountain behind me made a nice comfortable psychological backrest. I talk to myself when I walk, when I’m not singing arias from La Traviata, and as I walked I flipped through different ways of looking at being in my fifties. (I’m constantly bumping into this fact and getting surprised all over again.)
I reached 5,000 steps and turned around, toward the mountain. And suddenly the ocean turned blue. I had been looking at hard brilliance, walking toward the sun, but now the sun and the wind were at my back and the giant green mountain was before me. I was halfway through my walk, heading home.
And just at that moment, at that halfway point when the world surprised me by becoming even more unbearably beautiful, I had a wonderful realization – I am just halfway through my adult life. I’m not near-elderly, as the federal government likes to call people in their mid-fifties. I’ve been an adult for thirty years and with any luck, I’ll be an adult for at least another thirty. And this thirty years will be the thirty years in which I know who I am, in which I have good friends, in which I know how to take care of my emotional and physical health – all a huge improvement over the first thirty years.
So I’m heading into the back half of the game. Heading home, toward the mountain, wind at my back, sea and sky blue. I’m just starting the best part of my adult life.
I intend to enjoy every bit of it.
Thoughts on the Day After the Shortest Day
And.
That’s it. That’s possibly the most important idea that human language has captured.
I always thought life was a checklist. You make the list. You do the things on the list. You check them off and they’re done. I coach vocal technique and I’m constantly trying to figure out ways to get my students to automatically, naturally, relax their throats. One way is to tell them to imagine, especially around the holidays, that “Everything is done!” The student instantly emits a blissful sigh from a visibly relaxed throat and jaw.
The problem is that there is always more to put on the list. Sometimes I’m not employed in a full-time job, either on purpose or because of some misadventure on the universe’s part or an odd combination of the two, and my check-off list is always just about as long. My mother has been retired for over twenty years and HER check-off list is as long as mine. When there isn’t a 45-hour-a-week job involved in the mix, though, the check-off list has more, shall we say, optional things in it, like friends and house maintenance, and it spans a longer period of time. I start doing things in advance. I’ve always done this, always the first teacher in the building to have my grades done, for example, but when I’m not so slammed for time I tend to do my Christmas shopping in September, so it’ll be done. My idea of nirvana is to get everything done. In advance.
And…then what?
Exactly. And.
My brother always says, When everything is done, you’ll be dead. A smart guy, my brother, and as a long-time John Lennon fan, he is more able to Let It Be than most people.
I’m not much for process. I’d like to be. I’d like to live in the moment and smell the flowers and all those things. But I seem to always be looking at the end. What’s the long-range plan? What’s my mission statement and how will I get there in twenty years? How are today’s tasks building toward a life structure that I envisioned five years ago? Earlier this year I wrote a list (a list, a list!) of things I would do when I retire. At the top of the list was, “Get enough sleep.” And the funny thing is, I’m self-employed. And I’m the second income. And there’s no reason not to get enough sleep. Except I have this list…
And what’s on the list? I’m always either looking for a job or changing careers. This being me, I’m doing both right now, and since I can’t just choose a life direction and head there, I’ve got three career changes going on. I’ve been working on a career change to teaching for ten years, so now I have six licenses, covering an age range from Early Childhood to Middle School and a range of subjects that is conservatively Pretty Much Everything – and I’m working on getting an acting career going, and oh yes, there’s that writing thing. So networking, rehearsals, coaching, writing a blog. Actually, my biggest job at the moment is being the Keeper of the Keys for our household and we’re just coming off a year of renovation and smoke damage, plus we have a teenage son. So most items on the list have to do with scheduling, procurement, quality assurance, and inventory control of homework, clothing and food. We unexpectedly made a couple dozen friends this year and, never having done anything like that before, we were surprised at how much time it takes to have friends, kind of like what happens when you get a boyfriend or have a baby. And I’m putting off really settling into my fifties, so that takes time for working out, walking, and choosing food wisely. I used to schedule in non-motorized transportation time, because that’s a two-fer -- saving the earth and my health – but it took too long.
And I need to add more Saving the Earth stuff to my list. Yesterday I read in Time magazine that the Himalayan glaciers are melting. Three billion people literally depend on that glacier melt for their lives. The same article stated that many climatologists believe that we’re looking at the extreme edge of the envelope for global warming, and much faster than anyone anticipated – you can see the changes, year by year, with the human eye. You don’t even read about the “Great Die-off,” also known as the biggest extinction rate since the dinosaurs, or the deterioration of the ozone layer any more. Seems that we’ve run out of brain space for the number of planet-sized disasters we’ve created as a species.
But it might not be that bad. A friend of mine says that it’s not the planet we need to worry about. It’s ourselves. This big ol’ planet has healed itself, or changed to sustain different kinds of life, several times. Evolutionary niches will always be filled anew, if you wait long enough. It’s just that the Earth doesn’t much care if we’re one of those species being sustained or filling the niches, and I don’t think my descendants are guaranteed a seat in the theater to see what does fill those spaces in another couple million years.
So maybe I don’t like the process that we’re in, this particular epoch. Or maybe the flowers need to be sniffed now while they’re still there.
Martin Luther said, If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant my little apple tree. And who was it who said that jobs worth doing couldn’t be accomplished in one lifetime? As I mosey toward certain death (actually, in my twenties it felt like moseying – thirty years on it feels more like sliding and soon it may feel like hurtling), I’m becoming more aware that I will have to leave some jobs to others. (Although I’ve already picked out two candidates for my husband’s next wife, women I approve of and who will treat him well. There are two so he’ll have a choice.) I never did get that job of Empress of the World, so the task of delegating some of the bigger jobs is going more slowly than I’d like, the bigger jobs being things like achieving universal health care, outlawing meanness, and nuclear disarmament.
Today, the day after the winter solstice, is the first day of the new solar year – this morning, as Susan Cooper wrote in her beautiful poem “The Shortest Day,” the new year’s sunshine blazed awake. As the Earth continues in its accustomed path around the sun, our hemisphere will be tilting toward radiance more and more for the next six months. Instead of the days darkening and shortening, they will brighten and lengthen, as they have every year for the past billion years or so.
I will never finish everything on my list.
(Can I take a nap then, and read a non-improving book, and take the time to walk to the store?)
We’ll keep working on those jobs, daily and eternal, and when we’re done with our part, other people will pick up what we were doing.
And that’s the way it is.
And.
That’s it. That’s possibly the most important idea that human language has captured.
I always thought life was a checklist. You make the list. You do the things on the list. You check them off and they’re done. I coach vocal technique and I’m constantly trying to figure out ways to get my students to automatically, naturally, relax their throats. One way is to tell them to imagine, especially around the holidays, that “Everything is done!” The student instantly emits a blissful sigh from a visibly relaxed throat and jaw.
The problem is that there is always more to put on the list. Sometimes I’m not employed in a full-time job, either on purpose or because of some misadventure on the universe’s part or an odd combination of the two, and my check-off list is always just about as long. My mother has been retired for over twenty years and HER check-off list is as long as mine. When there isn’t a 45-hour-a-week job involved in the mix, though, the check-off list has more, shall we say, optional things in it, like friends and house maintenance, and it spans a longer period of time. I start doing things in advance. I’ve always done this, always the first teacher in the building to have my grades done, for example, but when I’m not so slammed for time I tend to do my Christmas shopping in September, so it’ll be done. My idea of nirvana is to get everything done. In advance.
And…then what?
Exactly. And.
My brother always says, When everything is done, you’ll be dead. A smart guy, my brother, and as a long-time John Lennon fan, he is more able to Let It Be than most people.
I’m not much for process. I’d like to be. I’d like to live in the moment and smell the flowers and all those things. But I seem to always be looking at the end. What’s the long-range plan? What’s my mission statement and how will I get there in twenty years? How are today’s tasks building toward a life structure that I envisioned five years ago? Earlier this year I wrote a list (a list, a list!) of things I would do when I retire. At the top of the list was, “Get enough sleep.” And the funny thing is, I’m self-employed. And I’m the second income. And there’s no reason not to get enough sleep. Except I have this list…
And what’s on the list? I’m always either looking for a job or changing careers. This being me, I’m doing both right now, and since I can’t just choose a life direction and head there, I’ve got three career changes going on. I’ve been working on a career change to teaching for ten years, so now I have six licenses, covering an age range from Early Childhood to Middle School and a range of subjects that is conservatively Pretty Much Everything – and I’m working on getting an acting career going, and oh yes, there’s that writing thing. So networking, rehearsals, coaching, writing a blog. Actually, my biggest job at the moment is being the Keeper of the Keys for our household and we’re just coming off a year of renovation and smoke damage, plus we have a teenage son. So most items on the list have to do with scheduling, procurement, quality assurance, and inventory control of homework, clothing and food. We unexpectedly made a couple dozen friends this year and, never having done anything like that before, we were surprised at how much time it takes to have friends, kind of like what happens when you get a boyfriend or have a baby. And I’m putting off really settling into my fifties, so that takes time for working out, walking, and choosing food wisely. I used to schedule in non-motorized transportation time, because that’s a two-fer -- saving the earth and my health – but it took too long.
And I need to add more Saving the Earth stuff to my list. Yesterday I read in Time magazine that the Himalayan glaciers are melting. Three billion people literally depend on that glacier melt for their lives. The same article stated that many climatologists believe that we’re looking at the extreme edge of the envelope for global warming, and much faster than anyone anticipated – you can see the changes, year by year, with the human eye. You don’t even read about the “Great Die-off,” also known as the biggest extinction rate since the dinosaurs, or the deterioration of the ozone layer any more. Seems that we’ve run out of brain space for the number of planet-sized disasters we’ve created as a species.
But it might not be that bad. A friend of mine says that it’s not the planet we need to worry about. It’s ourselves. This big ol’ planet has healed itself, or changed to sustain different kinds of life, several times. Evolutionary niches will always be filled anew, if you wait long enough. It’s just that the Earth doesn’t much care if we’re one of those species being sustained or filling the niches, and I don’t think my descendants are guaranteed a seat in the theater to see what does fill those spaces in another couple million years.
So maybe I don’t like the process that we’re in, this particular epoch. Or maybe the flowers need to be sniffed now while they’re still there.
Martin Luther said, If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant my little apple tree. And who was it who said that jobs worth doing couldn’t be accomplished in one lifetime? As I mosey toward certain death (actually, in my twenties it felt like moseying – thirty years on it feels more like sliding and soon it may feel like hurtling), I’m becoming more aware that I will have to leave some jobs to others. (Although I’ve already picked out two candidates for my husband’s next wife, women I approve of and who will treat him well. There are two so he’ll have a choice.) I never did get that job of Empress of the World, so the task of delegating some of the bigger jobs is going more slowly than I’d like, the bigger jobs being things like achieving universal health care, outlawing meanness, and nuclear disarmament.
Today, the day after the winter solstice, is the first day of the new solar year – this morning, as Susan Cooper wrote in her beautiful poem “The Shortest Day,” the new year’s sunshine blazed awake. As the Earth continues in its accustomed path around the sun, our hemisphere will be tilting toward radiance more and more for the next six months. Instead of the days darkening and shortening, they will brighten and lengthen, as they have every year for the past billion years or so.
I will never finish everything on my list.
(Can I take a nap then, and read a non-improving book, and take the time to walk to the store?)
We’ll keep working on those jobs, daily and eternal, and when we’re done with our part, other people will pick up what we were doing.
And that’s the way it is.
And.
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